Variability Studies with SDSS
Astrophysics
2008-11-26 v1
Abstract
The potential of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey for wide-field variability studies is illustrated using multi-epoch observations for 3,000,000 point sources observed in 700 deg2 of sky, with time spans ranging from 3 hours to 3 years. These repeated observations of the same sources demonstrate that SDSS delivers ~0.02 mag photometry with well behaved and understood errors. We show that quasars dominate optically faint (r > 18) point sources that are variable on time scales longer than a few months, while for shorter time scales, and at bright magnitudes, most variable sources are stars.
Cite
@article{arxiv.astro-ph/0301400,
title = {Variability Studies with SDSS},
author = {Z. Ivezic and R. H. Lupton and S. Anderson and L. Eyer and M. Juric and G. R. Knapp and G. Miknaitis and J. E. Gunn and C. M. Rockosi and D. Schlegel and M. A. Strauss and C. Stubbs and D. E. Vanden Berk},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:astro-ph/0301400},
year = {2008}
}
Comments
6 pages, 4 color figures, contribution for the workshop "Variability with Wide-field Imagers", Lampedusa, September 16-20, 2002